Love Vinyl Records – Forever Changes, Da Capo & Essential Albums on Vinyl

Love were one of the strangest and most important bands to come out of 1960s Los Angeles — an interracial, psychedelic folk-rock group led by the mercurial Arthur Lee, whose songwriting sits alongside Brian Wilson, Ray Davies and Syd Barrett in the pantheon of that era. They were the first rock band signed to Elektra, and for a brief stretch between 1966 and 1968 they were the most interesting band in the world.

Forever Changes, released in November 1967, is the record most people start with. It was recorded in the shadow of the Vietnam draft and Arthur Lee's conviction that he would not live to see another year — and it sounds like it, a baroque, orchestral, gorgeously doomed album with no real analogue in popular music. The first two records — the raw garage-rock debut Love and the experimental Da Capo — are equally essential in different ways.

Love records reward vinyl more than most 60s catalogues. The stereo mix of Forever Changes is extraordinary — strings and horns panned wide, Bryan MacLean and Arthur Lee's acoustic guitars intimate and close. The 2008 Mobile Fidelity and more recent 180g reissues are the ones to own.

Best Love Albums on Vinyl

Forever Changes (1967)
One of the greatest albums ever made, full stop. Alone Again Or, A House Is Not a Motel, The Red Telephone and Bummer in the Summer — songs that somehow channel the end of the 60s before it had quite arrived. The Mobile Fidelity 2xLP 45rpm edition is the definitive vinyl pressing.

Da Capo (1966)
The second album, and the most adventurous. Side one is tight baroque psychedelia — 7 and 7 Is is one of the hardest, strangest hit singles of the era — while side two is given over entirely to Revelation, an eighteen-minute freeform jam that pointed the way to everything Love would do next.

Love (1966)
The debut. Raw, punky, and recorded in less than a week. My Little Red Book (a Bacharach cover), Hey Joe, Mushroom Clouds and Signed D.C. set out the band's range in forty frantic minutes. An essential early document of the LA underground.

Four Sail (1969)
The first album with Arthur Lee's reconstructed Love Mk II, harder and more straightforwardly rock. August, Good Times and Always See Your Face — underrated, and the pressings tend to be clean.

Out Here (1969)
A sprawling double album recorded immediately after Four Sail with essentially the same band. Uneven by design, but the highlights — Signed D.C. revisited, Doggone, Stand Out — showcase Lee at his loosest and most exploratory.

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